by Lenora Bell
Riot of spun-sugar curls. Faint dark smudges under brilliant rainy-sky eyes. Tempting sliver of collarbone visible beneath gray-green patterned silk.
Dalton ripped his gaze away, retied his cravat in a simple knot, and ran a hand through his unruly hair.
Time to make his escape from tumbled and freshly bedded–looking beauties with bold, searching gazes.
“We’ll not stay long.” He searched for his hat in this rumpled excuse for a hired chariot. “We’ll have stopped at a second-rate inn. Could be unsavory characters about.”
And he chief among them.
He’d spent far too many hours last night imagining all the depraved things he wanted to do with her. She’d be safer with a highwayman.
She fastened hidden hooks under the embroidered satin of her pale green slim-fitting coat. “I’m that famished.” She tied her long dove-gray bonnet ribbons into a pert bow beneath her sharp little chin. “Now then. We need a story, Your Grace. In the event anyone at the inn asks questions. Whose traveling chariot are we riding in?”
“Con rented it from a merchant named Jones, I believe.” He located his hat. Even more deflated now. Had he slept on it? “What difference does it make?”
“It means that you’re the quite ordinary and humble Mr. Jones. And I’m the estimable Mrs. Jones. Let’s see . . .” She fingered her bonnet ribbon, staring out the window at the bustle of activity in the inn yard while he groped around the carriage for his greatcoat.
“Mr. Jones owns a chain of prosperous dry-goods shops. Flour . . . grains . . . oats, that sort of thing. Horses have to eat, you know. Bread must be baked. And we’ve got three children waiting in Bristol. Their names are . . . Melisande, Mirabelle, and . . . Michaelmas.”
Dalton blinked. He hadn’t had his morning coffee yet. It was far too early for children. “Michaelmas?”
“She was born on the holy day, poor thing.”
“Michaelmas is a girl?” Dalton jerked on his greatcoat and plopped his crushed hat on his head. “We don’t need a story.” He opened the door and leapt down from the carriage. “Because you’re not going to speak to anyone.”
Grasping her about the waist, he lifted her to the ground. Not strictly necessary, but expedient. Except that his hands didn’t want to relinquish her slender waist. Where was that voluminous gray cloak she’d been wrapped in last night?
There, balled in a corner of the coach. Too wrinkled to wear.
Her eyes lit with a saucy glint. “Would you rather we had a boy, Mr. Jones?”
Dalton snatched his hands away and took a step backward. “I’d rather not have this conversation at all.”
Thankfully, everyone else in the stable yard went about their business, saddling horses and hauling feed buckets, too industrious to notice the insurrection being mounted before their eyes.
This was supposed to be a quiet, uneventful journey.
She tilted her head back so she could see him more clearly from under her bonnet brim. “Then pray inform me who you have traveling with you on your carriage bed. Olofsson of the talented feet?”
He slammed the carriage door and marched her toward the inn. “You’re decorous Lady Dorothea. I encountered you desperate and alone by the side of the road, the mail coach you so rashly hired having left you behind when you stopped too long at an inn to pester the innkeeper with questions.”
Lady Dorothea smiled triumphantly. “You’re making up stories, Your Grace. But I like mine better, don’t you? Mr. Jones is such a very prosaic and agreeable sort of fellow. Why, he never scolds his darling wife. And he never, ever glowers. Or growls.”
Dalton glowered. And then he growled. “I’m begging you to go inside quietly and sip your tea swiftly. Lady Dorothea.”
“Oh, do call me Thea, Mr. Jones. I should think with three children I might grant you that liberty.”
Dangerous words, those.
Ladies named Dorothea would never speak to tradesmen in a second-rate inn and attract too much attention. But recalcitrant Theas might very well make a scene.
He shook his head. “Not Thea. Not Mrs. Jones,” he muttered.
Her eyes narrowed in the watery morning light.
Dalton ignored the warning and hastened her toward the doorway of the inn.
A man in the sober black clothing and white collar of the clergy emerged and walked past them.
“Caro mio! Che bella giornata!” Lady Dorothea shouted, sweeping her hand toward the lowering sky.
The clergyman craned his neck to stare at them.
“What in God’s name was that?” Dalton whispered when the clergyman was safely past.
“If I’m not the wife, I must be the mistress. And staid Mr. Jones prefers passionate opera singers,” she announced.
There went her fingers again, rubbing the length of bonnet ribbon silk. “I do speak perfect Italian, you know. And my lyric soprano is quite good.”
And he was the damned archbishop. “You’re as English as Yorkshire pudding. No one will believe you’re Italian.” He marched her to the door. “Now go inside. Quietly. No more Italian. And no more stories. Do you understand?”
She frowned. “I used to sit in the town square in Florence and observe the conversations. It’s all in the hand gestures, you know.”
She raised her arm with a dramatic flourish. “I’m Dame Gabrielli, the famous coloratura from Florence.” She cocked her hip and placed a fist on the resulting swell.
A stable hand turned, his gaze caught by her unguarded movements and captured by the buttercup curls spilling over her shoulders.
Dalton gritted his teeth. “If you long for adulation you should return to London, where your adoring public waits to heap roses at your feet.”
The glow in her eyes extinguished. “I don’t want adulation. I want freedom.” She tossed her head. “I want to sing at the top of my lungs. I want to . . . I want to live.”
Something tightened in Dalton’s chest. It was only natural for her to fabricate other realities when she’d been living under her mother’s stern control her entire existence.
But her burgeoning rebellion wasn’t convenient for his plans. He nudged her toward the doorway. “We need to reach Bristol swiftly, attracting no notice. If we meet anyone we know you’ll be ruined instantly. It’s dangerous for you, surely you acknowledge that much.”
“Do you truly think me witless? Of course I know that. But the story can only help us. If the travelers at this second-rate inn, who are hardly likely to recognize us, believe they’ve encountered an opera singer and a prosperous merchant, they’ll have no tales to tell of”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“dukes and spinsters.”
There was some sense to that. No . . . no, there wasn’t. It was always best to simply keep one’s mouth closed.
Let people make up their own stories.
“You’re going inside and I’m going to the stables.” He handed her some coins from his waistcoat pocket. “I’ll pay for your tea. You’ll sip it swiftly.”
Her fingers closed around the coins. “Whatever you desire, caro mio,” she said in that affected Italian accent with a sugary smile pasted on her lips. “Your wish is my command.”
The obedient act didn’t fool him.
There wasn’t an obedient bone in that slim, curvaceous body of hers. And her next words proved it.
“I’ll try not to serenade the good folk at the inn with more than one or two arias.” Her hips swished in a suspiciously operatic fashion as she disappeared through the doorway of the inn.
Too many people around to hoist the lady over his shoulder, bind her wrists with his cravat, and bundle her back in a carriage to London with Con.
Dalton could ride the rest of the way to Bristol on horseback. Alone.
On second thought, better let Con do the tying, because thinking of something so intimate with the lady shot an arrow of pure lust to his groin.
His stomach growled. He could do with breakfast. But they needed to be on the road again swiftly, to minimize the ri
sk of the news of his whereabouts reaching London.
Dalton didn’t know why Trent had been searching for him. But he certainly didn’t want him to hear about the cut across his face.
Gingerly, he probed the wound. It could do with a washing.
He strode to the stables and sluiced cold water from the pump over his face.
His mind cleared with the shock of the bracing water, the sound of horses pawing. Brisk smell of horse dung. Leather. Straw. Simple smells with no hint of spiced rose petals.
He followed the sound of Con’s whistling to one of the stalls.
Con’s grizzled face split into a grin when he saw him. “Well now, if it isn’t Sleeping Beauty. Finally decided to awaken, eh? Where’s your lady suitor?”
“You can wipe that smirk off your face. Nothing happened. And that was an infantile trick to play with the bed.”
“Can’t think what you mean.” Con wasn’t very good at appearing innocent. Too hairy.
“You know very well what I mean.” Dalton gave him a disgusted look.
“You mean she didn’t have her way with you? I thought a persistent thing like her might teach you a thing or two you didn’t learn at Cambridge.”
“Oh, ha ha.” Dalton grimaced as his skin cracked over the cut. “It’s really not a laughing matter. The lady will be ruined if anyone recognizes us.”
Con snapped a horse bridle between his hands, testing the strength. He never left anything to chance, preferring to personally oversee the details of their excursions. “As long as you don’t ruin her, she’ll survive.”
“Leave off. You know I’d never debauch an innocent.” Although it had been exquisite torture holding her warm curves against his chest.
You don’t feel those urges . . . right now?
A less principled man would’ve taken those words as a clear invitation to seduction.
“Sure and I wasn’t talking about debauching. I was thinking more of wooing. Composing treacly verses about her eyes, that sort of thing. Making her love you and then abandoning her.” His blue eyes sharpened. “I won’t have you doing that. I like the lady.”
Dalton sighed. “I like her, too, damn her scorched butter curls. Even though she has the most irritating habit of not listening to a word I say . . . and then disarming me by making me laugh.”
Con shook his head, his whiskers twitching with barely concealed mirth. “Can’t have her making you laugh, now. That won’t do.”
Dalton was an expert at tracking criminals through the crooked maze of London’s back lanes. He could fell a man with one blow. Find a vulnerable neck with his blade in five seconds flat.
But he was beginning to suspect there were far more treacherous predicaments.
Being confined in small spaces with the most vexing and desirable woman he’d ever met, for one.
Wallflowers bursting into impassioned Italian in courtyards, for another.
She longed to be free from her mother’s control. He’d met the countess and certainly wouldn’t want her telling him what to do, but he couldn’t allow the lady to increase the risks inherent in confusing the strict boundaries between his two worlds . . . the rake and the Hellhound.
It was too dangerous. For his plans. And for her safety.
“We’ve a killer to hunt,” Dalton said sternly. “Or have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t forgotten.” Con ran his hand over the leather horse tack, testing the bridles and reins. “Though I’m none too happy about going back to Ireland. Never thought I’d see those shores again. Too many painful memories.”
It was the same with Dalton. They were both returning to their troubled pasts.
“Do you have other family left in Cork?” he asked Con.
Con jerked his head. “Nah, not anymore.”
Dalton had never seen Con shaken like this. It wasn’t fair to ask him to do this, he realized. “You should return to London. I’ll carry on alone.”
Con grunted, giving a harness a last tug. “I’ve come this far. Besides, it’s damned entertaining watching that slip of a lady wedge herself so thoroughly under your skin.”
“Like a patch of poison ivy,” Dalton said bleakly. “Scratching only makes it worse. She’s probably in the breakfast room right now serenading everyone with a bleeding aria.”
Con grinned. “Arias, is it?”
“Wants to make up stories about us. I’m Mr. Jones and she’s a famous opera singer. Been repressed by that overbearing mother of hers her whole life and now she’s breaking free.”
“Like I said, damned entertaining. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Con gestured for a stable hand to come and take the horse tack. “I’ll finish up here. Go fetch the opera singer and we’ll be on our way.”
Someone had to corral the lady back to the carriage.
And then he’d have to climb in after her because of the risk of a nobleman seeing him with this telltale crimson slash across his jaw in the daylight.
At least there’d be no more beds involved in their brief acquaintance. He’d convert the makeshift bed back to a seat immediately.
Though that was small protection.
Something about her brought out the beast in him.
When he entered the inn, he saw her immediately, across the smoky, low-beamed room, as if the other people were underwater, their features blurred, while she glowed in sharp relief.
Weak sunlight filtering through streaked glass caressed strands of honey and amber in her hair, and rested on her skin because it had the right to touch her, to warm her.
He wanted to touch her. Right now. Claim her as his.
And it looked like he wasn’t the only one. A gangly fair-haired young man in a high, starched collar that left only the scarlet tips of his ears visible approached her table and stopped to address her in an unforgivably familiar manner. A hot wash of rage swept through Dalton’s chest before he reminded himself that he couldn’t possibly be jealous of a pup who’d barely started shaving.
He wasn’t the jealous type. He never felt possessive about a woman. They were transitory diversions. No more his than the moon or the stars.
He never gave them any illusions about his intentions. And they never left dissatisfied.
So it wasn’t jealousy he felt, it was mere protectiveness.
The same kind of protectiveness he would feel for any small, helpless creature that ventured across his path.
Except that she wasn’t helpless. She’d bent him to her purposes easily enough.
Still, some dangers were too much for even a determined and thoroughly resourceful lady.
That pup may look harmless, but the first rule of traveling was never to talk to inquisitive strangers. Especially if they wanted to know what route you were taking, or when you planned to depart.
She’d been too sheltered. She had no protective shell.
She smiled at the pup in the high collar.
Dalton’s hands tightened into fists and he crossed the room in three strides.
“Oh, there you are, Mr. Jones.” She smiled at Dalton. “I was beginning to think you’d fallen into the horse trough. Coffee?”
She didn’t wait for him to answer but poured him a cup from the silver pot on the table. “I know you take your coffee strong. Wouldn’t do to weaken it with milk or anything as indulgent as sugar.”
The boy in the starched collar took one look at Dalton’s face, stammered his apologies, and made a hasty retreat back to his own table. As well he should.
Dalton took his place across from Lady Dorothea and accepted a cup of strong, black coffee. He could use a cup. Or five.
For the first time he noticed she must have borrowed a traveling writing desk, and appeared to be composing a note.
Dalton gulped his coffee down in two swallows. “Writing a letter to someone?”
“My mother.” The nib of her pen scratched across the page.
Dalton’s cup banged against the saucer. “No mention of me, I trust?”
“None
whatsoever,” she said breezily. “Not everything is about you, you know.”
A stout man in a striped waistcoat glanced their way. Far too many people who might remember his face, the cut across his jaw.
Dalton ripped a roll in half and slathered it with butter. He’d give her two more minutes.
In the morning light, in the low-ceilinged room, Osborne was truly monolithic.
One glance from him and other men scurried away like terrified mice.
One glance at him and her mind simmered with forbidden desires.
She remembered the feel of his muscular arms embracing her, steadying her against his chest. The moment when he’d told her he thought she was beautiful.
Her hand shook and ink splotched across the paper.
Foolish girl. You mustn’t let him seep into your thoughts and leave an indelible stain.
She’d woken hours before him and lain in the jostling carriage, watching him sleep. Watching morning light tease bronze from his hair and play across the rugged landscape of his face.
He reached for another roll. He ate in the same way he approached everything: swallowing it nearly whole, taking no time to savor, simply devouring as his due all that life laid before him.
She bent back over her letter. Only a few more lines.
The duke wiped his fingers on a napkin. “I was just contemplating removing my neck cloth, tying you up, and bundling you back to your mother. How about that instead of a letter?”
Thea’s head snapped up. “You wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, wouldn’t I?” His fingers moved to his cravat, tugging the end just a bit, drawing her eye to the threat. “Don’t tempt me,” he said darkly. “I only want one more reason. One more minuscule reason.”
“I’d only find another way to escape London.”
“That what starched collar over there is? Another way to leave?” He turned that ferocious glare toward the man who had lent her his writing desk.
His glowering stare sent a naughty quiver through her. He was so clearly asserting his claim to be by her side.
“I’ll have you know Mr. Cooper is a respectable clerk.”
“Don’t like the look of him. Too crimson about the ears. Like an underdone suckling pig.”
